Four AI agents using Google’s Gemini 4 Argon defeated the Ender Dragon, Minecraft’s final boss, without human help. According to Google DeepMind researchers, the team finished in 27 hours and 14 minutes. They began in a randomly created survival world on Easy difficulty, with cheating commands turned off. Nobody assigned them roles or gave them a strategy.
Instead of watching a screen or pressing keys, the agents wrote short programs to control their players through software called Mineflayer. They divided the work themselves, making tools, gathering food and sharing advice through messages and notes. They also collected items left behind when teammates died. Overall, they wrote 2,783 programs, exchanged 229 messages and died 605 times.
However, the experiment had limits. Mineflayer provided exact information about nearby blocks and creatures, including those behind solid rock, while another software tool planned routes. About 22% of the agents’ programs ended in errors, and the result came from only one test. A fifth AI agent watched for cheating and found none. Researchers could pause or stop the experiment, but did not need to.
